Whether you buy a computer from us, or you are shopping on your own, we recommend you replace your computers every four years. That’s why the computers we sell generally have four-year warranties and our contracts are setup to provide labor for computer replacements so that your business shouldn’t have a computer over four years old in your environment (basically replacing 25% of your inventory every year).

IT budgeting should not be a surprise. Just like you budget for gas in your car, oil changes, repairs, you need to budget for your IT. If you plan a timeline ahead of time to replace your machines, all your IT expenses will be budgeted for and part of the cost of doing business, and your employees will be happier as they have machines that are customized to do the job that they need them to do and should be less prone to errors and failure.

Planning out replacing 25% of your machines per year not only makes sense from an expense perspective, but also from an productivity standpoint: if you just do a big buy every four years to replace all of your machines, that is a big disruption to your business flow and productivity. If you replace a quarter of your inventory annually, you don’t have one large massive interruption to productivity.

But we get asked: Why replace every four years if the computers still work?

The biggest reason? Stuff starts breaking and support gets harder to find.

While SSDs have mostly replaced mechanical drives in desktops and laptops, which means one less moving part in a computer that can fail, things generally start breaking after four years. Even though computers can generally be warrantied up to 5 years, it gets harder and harder to make warranty claims in those later years because of part availability – they just don’t keep manufacturing as many parts for the older machines as they do when the machines are fairly new.

We don’t like downtime, and we’re assuming your business doesn’t, either.

But even assuming all the hardware is still working properly, what if you have a device driver issue? What if your network jack or graphics card starts freaking out or there’s a security issue with the firmware in your system? As the machine gets older, the likelihood of your issue getting fixed gets slimmer and slimmer. And the last thing you need is a security issue with your computer that could cause a breach, exposing your or your client’s data.

A few more points:

• Software updates frequently, but if your hardware doesn’t, you may be running software that is being choked by older hardware. This makes your employees less efficient because they’re taking longer to complete tasks.
• Even if you have a spare machine to swap an employee to, it still takes time to get that user up and running on that machine, get it customized, etc… . During this time, they’re not going to be as productive.

Long story short: When you plan on replacements every four years, you can budget for it, and your team stays productive. We work with our clients to assist with that budgeting and planning process for computer replacements. Contact us today to learn how our CompleteCare managed IT services can help support your existing environment and budget and plan your company’s lifecycle management to make sure you don’t fall prey to hardware failures or security issues because of out-of-date computers.